After Perry, Mitt's Anti-Shame and Herman's Eating of Face

Now that we've all come to grips with the fact that Rick Perry is merely a malfunctioning android from the Planet Zetar, we can get around to considering exactly how stupid the rest of the Republican presidential field thinks the rest of us are. Now, this is a genetic condition with Newt Gingrich — all the other sperms hated the sperm that created Newt because it kept calling them stupid sperms who should probably just end up on the bedpost so that they don't help create stupid journalists or someone — so it was no surprise that he tried to run that jive last night about how he functioned as a "historian" in his own boutique lobbying shoppe. (Next up on Fox News Channel: I Was a Botanist for the NRA.) But the rest of them aren't even trying any more.

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Herman Cain argued that we should not pay attention to his alleged horndoggery because there are "millions" of women whom he declined to horndog. Back a few years, I covered the sanity hearings of Jeffrey Dahmer and, every day on the way to the courthouse, I walked past hundreds of Milwaukeeans who had remained uneaten. Never thought of that as an alibi for the accused, though. But it's Herman's. Take it or leave it.

And Willard? He has passed through shame, and he has passed through shamelessness. We need a new word for what he's practicing now. Is he now traveling at the speed of hypershamelessness? Let's borrow a term from Church history and call it anti-shame. He knows there's no way out for him from the endless videotape and audiotape of the campaigns he ran in Massachusetts. He knows that the health-care plan he pushed as governor there is everything that his more rabid rivals say it is, and more. So the guy who adjusted his positions on the issues in his own books between the hardcover and paperback editions defended himself last night by pointing out to America that he had not yet run off with a stripper or converted to the worship of Baal. And that was the entirety of his defense against the charge that he can be led around by the nose by any political pressure group that can afford to buy a leash. Take it or leave it.

Usually, politicians are more careful with the spin. Mistakes were made. If I offended anyone, etc. etc. Very rarely do they look the country in the eye and tell the country that the sun rose in the west this morning, and, otherwise, it can stuff its concerns in a sack. This is just the way it's going to be. Ask whatever questions you want. These are the answers I am giving. Lined up against the rest of what went on, Perry's blink-out may have been the most honest moment of the night.

(Feel free to leave your thoughts on the state of play, in the comments below.)